Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture

In 1994, the Administrative Committee of the National Communication Association established the Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture. The Arnold Lecture is given in a plenary session each year at the annual convention of the Association and features the most accomplished researchers in the field. The topic of the lecture changes annually so as to capture the wide range of research being conducted in the field and to demonstrate the relevance of that work to society at large.

The lecture is named for Carroll C. Arnold, who was Professor Emeritus at The Pennsylvania State University. Trained under Professor A. Craig Baird at the University of Iowa, Arnold was the co-author (with John Wilson) of Public Speaking as a Liberal Art, author of Criticism of Oral Rhetoric (among other works), and co-editor of The Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory. Although primarily trained as a humanist, Arnold was nonetheless one of the most active participants in the New Orleans Conference of 1968, which helped put social scientific research in communication on solid footing. Thereafter, Arnold edited Communication Monographs because he was fascinated by empirical questions. As one of the three founders of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric, Arnold also helped move the field toward increased dialogue with the humanities in general. For these reasons and more, Arnold was dubbed “The Teacher of the Field” when he retired from Penn State in 1977. Arnold died in January of 1997.

Considering the controversy over the redesign of the U.S. twenty dollar bill, I consult with ghosts and ghouls of the culture wars to imagine other ways of relating to traumatic histories. What discourses might emerge when our money --our main symbol and mode of accounting for value-- is engraved with the visages of ancestors who remind us of enslavement, settler colonialism and racial capitalism? I survey presidential and fugitive journeys to grave sites and school yards, then steal a glance at television shows and news headlines to ponder how the graphic Union of an escaped slave and the cartographer of the Trail of Tears could help us distinguish grief from grievance. Or, put another way, if money talks, how will the new twenty dollar bill gossip about U.S.?

Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Barack Obama

On March 18, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama stood before a podium at Philadelphia's Constitution Center and began a speech dedicated to the subject of white and black race relations with the words, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union." Since that moment, scholars and citizens, journalists and activists have reflected on the promise of "A More Perfect Union" and asked, "What happened?" The President's election seemed to indicate a wide-spread desire for unity in the United States. At the time, claims of a post-racial America seemed overly optimistic; nevertheless, national polls indicated that most adults viewed relations between whites and blacks as either "somewhat good" or "very good." By 2015, however, public opinion had swung in the opposite direction. A majority of adults believed that race relations were "somewhat bad" or "very bad." In his 2016 Carroll C. Arnold lecture, Dr. Kirt H. Wilson contends that when we ask what happened to the hoped for unity of Obama's Philadelphia address, we first need to interrogate how society selectively remembers the struggle for black freedom in the United States.

Dr. Wilson argues that since the early 1990s, but especially with the civil rights movement's golden anniversary, public rhetoric in the United States has reframed a collective memory of the movement. Specifically, a set of narratives has emerged that reconfigures past racial and political conflicts into a demonstration of the nation's enduring commitment to equality and democracy. This memory is not entirely stable, but it is sufficiently coherent to influence not only our understanding of history but also our deliberations about social justice in the present. Today citizens communicate about racial divisions, social protests, and remedies to discrimination within a horizon of possible action that is constrained by what we remember about the civil rights movement's purpose, success and failure.

By analyzing the relationships among three communicative phenomena--the symbolic proposition of a more perfect union, commemorative rhetoric about the civil rights movement, and contemporary activism to remediate racial injustice--Dr. Wilson reinterprets the conditions that have led to a pessimistic view of current interracial relations. Contrary to what some suggest, he is optimistic that we have arrived at an important juncture. The unrealized hopes for Obama's presidency and recent instances of racial conflict invite us to consider what we have forgotten about our past. It is more possible today than it was in 2008 to construct different memories of the black freedom struggle. These alternatives provide new resources for political action and communication. While some of these memories force us to abandon the ideal of a "perfect union," they may offer a better foundation for creating a just society.

FLIP IT: How Complex Social Problems Can be Solved Simply and Communicatively by Looking for Positive Deviance

In this lecture, Dr. Singhal argues that often the most complex of social problems have simple communicative solutions that are hidden from plain view. To uncover them, one needs to flip mindsets and ask flipped questions that allows us to identify and amplify positive deviance. Positive Deviance (PD) is a novel approach to individual, organizational, and social change based on the observation that in every community there exist certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing worse challenges. The PD approach has been employed in over 40 countries to decrease malnutrition and infant and maternal mortality; reduce school dropouts and improve graduation rates; prevent and control hospital-acquired infections and improve pain management; and boost respect and trust among prisoners and prison guards. Driven by data, the PD approach flips the normative ways of conducting expert-driven needs assessment and gap-analysis on its head, and follows a systematic process of uncovering cost-effective and culturally appropriate solutions from within the local community.

What is Knowledge For? And What Does Communication Have to Do with It?

One hundred years supplies us with a good body of evidence for appraising what we have done. In this talk I examine several nested questions: what is knowledge for? what is the nature of professional knowledge? what has communication studies accomplished? These questions invite us both to reflect on how we care for our field and to ponder the role of the university and even the purpose of life.

“The Incessant Moan”: Reanimating Zombie Voices

In his popular parody of survivalist culture, The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks indexed a persistent challenge to communication studies. Brooks warned that while hunkered down in one’s fortress during a zombie apocalypse, one should use earplugs to muffle the zombie wail penetrating the walls because the zombie sound is “deadly.” Eric King Watts, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill argued the ideals of communication studies compel us to instead amplify the “incessant moan” and endow “zombie voice.”

Voice Lessons for Social Change

The Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, "Voice Lessons for Social Change," was delivered by Brenda J. Allen, University of Colorado, Denver. Professor Allen explored how communication scholarship about voice can inform efforts to effect social change. She reviewed relevant research and share lessons learned for addressing pressing social problems.

Seduction and Sustainability: The Politics of Feminist Communication and Career Scholarship

The Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, "Seduction and Sustainability: The Politics of Feminist Communication and Career Scholarship," was presented by Patrice M. Buzzanell, Purdue University. This lecture acknowledged the work that communication scholars and researchers across academe have done toward enhancing better quality of life and inclusionary processes on individual, group, and institutional levels. These efforts have known no methodological, theoretical, epistemological, or contextual boundaries. Buzzanell explored both struggles and possibilities as communication scholars work toward enhancing inclusion and creating sustainable institutional change in academe and other life realms.

Discursive Struggles of Relating

The Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, "Discursive Struggles of Relating," was presented by Leslie A. Baxter, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa. Relating is a cacophony of disparate, often competing, discourses. Meaning-making emerges out of this dialogic agitation in which discourses bump up against each other in ongoing interplay. This view of relating is the central tenet of Relational Dialectics Theory, a theory of communication and relationships developed by Baxter and her colleagues and grounded in the philosophy of dialogism articulated in the 1930s by Russian literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Baxter discussed the discursive struggles that animate relating in a variety of relationship types, as well as some broader implications for how we can approach the study of communication from a dialogic lens.

Coming to Terms with Cultures

The Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, "Coming to Terms with Cultures," was presented by Gerry F. Philipsen, University of Washington. We all live in a world not only of culture, but of cultures, and in our lives we face moments when we struggle to come to terms with the cultures that surround us. In the 2008 Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, Gerry F. Philipsen, University of Washington, presented a framework, grounded in research, for how individuals can come to terms with the cultures of their life worlds. The talk emphasized communication strategies for dealing with four different situations in which: (1) a dominant culture can work against your purposes, (2) you seek to challenge or undermine a dominant culture, (3) you seek to integrate within one life two cultures that are crucial to your identity, or (4) you seek to reconstruct your life when a culture that had been a source of strength to you begins to crumble around you.

NCA thanks Pearson/Allyn & Bacon for its continued support of the Arnold Lecture. NCA also thanks the many friends, colleagues, and students of Carroll Arnold who honored his scholarly contributions with their personal donations to the Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture Fund.

Janis Andersen

Peter Andersen

Kenneth Andersen

Ronald Applbaum

Susan Applbaum

Carroll C. Arnold

Deborah Atwater

Robert Avery

Wallace Bacon

Harold Barrett

Charles L. Bartow

Samuel Becker

Thomas W. Benson

Roy Berko

Goodwin Berquist

Erwin Bettinghaus

Jane Blankenship

Don Boileau

John Waite Bowers

Irving Brown

Robert Brubaker

Joseph Bulsys

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

Noreen M. Carrocci

Ingeborg G. Chaly

Kristin F. Chaudoin

Sister Joan Chittister

Timothy Y. Choy

Kenneth Cissna

Herman Cohen

Celeste Condit

Martha Cooper

E. Sam Cox

Ralph B. Culp

John Daly

Arlie Daniel

Suzanne M. Daughton

Arthur F. Dauria

Robert Doolittle

Nancy Dunbar

Robert Dunham

Margaret Eadie

William Eadie

Flo Beth Ehninger

Lois Einhorn

Donald Ellis

Keith Erickson

Walter Fisher

Paul Friedman

Gustav Friedrich

Linda Fuller

D. C. Gila

Susan Gilpin

James Golden

Dennis S. Gouran

Richard Gregg

Leland Griffin

Bruce Gronbeck

Roderick P. Hart

Kenneth Harwood

Gerard Hauser

Nola Heidelbaugh

Kathryn Hening

Thomas Hopkins

Robert Hopper

Fredric Jablin

Carol Jablonski

Anita C. James

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

J. Vernon Jensen

Bonnie Johnson

Christopher Johnstone

Henry Johnstone

Lynne Kelly

Corwin P. King

Dennis R. Klinzing

Mark Knapp

Roberta L. Kosberg

Kathleen Kougl

Manuel I. Kuhr

Robert Kully

Reiko Kuramoto

James M. Lahiff

Dale Leathers

Beverly Whitaker Long

Stephen Lucas

Jeanne Lutz

Cheryl Malone

A. Jackson McCormack

James McCroskey

Sherrie L. McNeeley

Martin Medhurst

Paul Messaris

N. Edd Miller

Ray Nadeau

Mary Newman

Thomas Nilsen

Victoria O’Donnell

Thomas Olbricht

Thomas J. Pace

Arlie Parks

Stanley Paulson

Douglas Pedersen

Sue D. Pendell

Mary Pettas

Gerald Phillips

Darrell T. Piersol

Linda Putnam

Sharon Ratliffe

Loren Reid

Beatrice Reynolds

Richard D. Rieke

Stanley Rives

Lawrence Rosenfeld

Alan Rubin

Rebecca Rubin

Akira Sanbonmatsu

Joan Sanbonmatsu

Father Leo Sands

Thomas Scheidel

Patricia Schmidt

Robert L. Scott

David Seibold

Barbara Sharf

Daniel Shurman

Malcolm Sillars

Herbert Simons

Craig R. Smith

Jo Sprague

Hermann Stelzner

Nathan P. Stucky

Jerry Tarver

Anita Taylor

Robert Tiemens

Kathleen J. Turner

Richard Vatz

Paul A. Walwick

Steven A. Ward

Robert Welch

Molly Wertheimer

Eugene White

Harold E. Wisner

James A. Wood

Julia Wood

Margaret Wood

David Zarefsky

If you are interested in supporting the Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture as one of its benefactors, please send your contribution to The Arnold Lecture Fund, National Communication Association, 1765 N Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036.

Pearson Higher Education is proud to sponsor the Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture series. As publishers committed to the discipline of communication, Pearson Higher Education is dedicated to working together with the National Communication Association to further research, disseminate vital information, and encourage participation in the field of communication.